


The bruises that you left behind

by Cuits



Series: The inherent violence of the silence [3]
Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Happy Ending, Nobody is Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22425529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: Six months after that, David finds her in the streets of Paris.Or the one where everything happened the way it did and Julia survived.
Relationships: David Budd/Julia Montague
Series: The inherent violence of the silence [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1146857
Comments: 20
Kudos: 118





	The bruises that you left behind

Julia knew she was smart when she was eight years old. She did good in school, she was good with puzzles, good with languages too. It took her a little longer to realize that she was smarter than most boys, she was twenty, killing it in college and always pretending to be dumber than she was so as not to scare her dates away.

It took her five years into her marriage to be certain that she would be a better and more efficient politician than her husband could ever be, and five more years to actually take action and act on that thought.

After that, the marriage didn’t last long. She hadn’t realized when she said her vows that  _ worse, poorer, sickness _ would only apply to her and that it was never intended to go both ways.

**_A woman with ambition is cursed_ ** , her mother used to say. Her mother, that was self-schooled and brilliant in all the ways that are usually unappreciated. She was right, of course. 

Julia had to work harder than any male peer, reach farther than any man, be quicker, smarter and far, far more enduring than any man she has ever met. She took all the insults and the depreciating slurs thrown at her and made an armour out of them.

She divorced, forgot about children, neglected her family and only had time for the  appearance of friendships  when political gain was at play.

She even forgot she ever had any interests besides politics, and created a public persona so proficient, than soon enough nobody cared to see that there was a real person behind the heartless, self-righteous bitch.

She had been bullied, harassed and terrorized. She had been ridiculed, laughed at on national TV, demeaned. 

A woman with ambition is cursed indeed.

When she wakes up, her whole body hurts. The bright light of the fluorescents makes her eyes sting, her nose and mouth are so dry that it feels like the air she breathes tears open her throat.

Her brain is fuzzy. She doesn’t know where she is or what has happened to her, doesn’t recognize her surroundings except for the steady beeping noise that makes her think of medical equipment.

A man that is the living, breathing analogue of a brick wall with a blonde toupee appears in her vision field. He is wearing green scrubs.

“Good. You are awake at last,” he says to her. His accent is hard and thick. “Now, you’ll have to man up. There is some hard work ahead.”

His condescension is highly unappreciated, and if she had any saliva or energy to spare she would put him in his place, whoever he is.

“Fuck off,” she says, her voice sounds like sandpaper.

These, she will come to find, are her first words as the person who used to be Julia Montague.

She is particularly proud of them.

She is still heavily sedated, coming in and out of it, for what she estimates might be some weeks. There is a window in her room, big, thick, translucent glass that lets the light come in but hides from her the landscape ahead. 

The building is practical, clean, devoid of anything ornamental or functionless. Mostly concrete and steel.

The pain, even subdued by the painkillers is ubiquitous. She can’t pinpoint what hurts more or what hurts less, and by the state of what she can see of her own body, immobilised and covered in bandages, she assumes the damage is… extensive.

Nobody has talked to her yet about what had happened, and she can’t quite remember, but she knows this: no fellow politician has come to collect the scraps of constituencies’ pity by visiting her, no one from her office has come to brief her. 

Neither has David, and that means he is either in worse condition than her or…

They reduce the sedation progressively. She knows this because she is able to stay awake for longer periods of time and her mouth doesn’t constantly taste like cotton, but the slow passing of hours are a small torture, with little to focus on but the way her body hurts.

She wakes up one day and there is a chair next to her bed that wasn’t there the night before. Half an hour later the German chancellor makes her entrance. Like the building, she is also practical and devoid of ornaments, also made of concrete and steel.

“Julia,” she says acknowledging her. She takes the chair and wastes no time. “You have been officially dead for almost eight months, now.”

She closes her eyes for one second and thinks  _ fuck _ . Just  _ shit. Fucking fuck _ .

“Is this supposed to be heaven or hell,” Julia’s voice is unfaltering but rough and foreign from disuse. “Because either way, I find it… falls short.”

The chancellor laughs for just a brief moment. She crosses her hands over her lap and indulges her inconsistent act of rebelliousness. They are friends, after all, or as close to friends as two people who work in the business of politics and secrets for their own countries can be. 

They have bonded many times over the stupid egos of men in power, and here they are now.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not that bad, for a dead woman.”

“I’m sorry, Julia. The plan was to extract you right before the bombing took place, but that PPO of yours proved to be rather… efficient at his job.”

The mention of David makes her whole body hurt in a completely different way. She has been pointedly avoiding thinking about what might have been of him, telling herself that the dwelling in the uncertainty would simply drive her mad.

“Yes, he is very dedicated,” she chooses her words and her tone carefully. He chooses the present tense and hopes for the best. “Is he alive?” she asks with indifference, not showing cards she doesn’t have any need to be showing.

The Chancellor stares at her for a couple of seconds more than needed. This is a game they both know how to play extremely well: to create tension, to create anticipation, to disclose only as much information as would be beneficial to one’s cause.

“Yes,” she finally says and Julia struggles not to let her relief be shown. “Surprisingly so. He’s been busy kicking some major hornets nests.”

Julia doesn’t ask for clarifications. There will be a time for that, soon, she hopes, when she is more certain of the terms and the extent of the protection the Chancellor is providing for her.

“Let’s not fuck around, Angela, neither of us have that kind of patience.”

“I want you to work for me.”

_ Work  _ is the oldest coded word for espionage that there is in the book. It makes her uneasy, the spoils of scruples she didn’t know she still had making themselves present.

It should be an easy kind of choice: their countries are not in the middle of a war, it’s not like they are asking her to be Matahari. Yet, the thought of having to act against her own country cracks her battered, little heart. She always considered her red lines to be carved in stone and committing treason to be out of the question. 

“Do I have a choice?”

“There is always a choice, but I doubt that you living in rural Bavaria would satisfy either of us.”

Julia keeps her mouth shut and her stare fixed on the wall in front of her. Her hands lay aimlessly on her lap and she remains unmoving until she is left alone in the room again. Everything she thought about herself crumbles around her: her future, her dreams, her principles are out of her reach now.

Julia Montague is dead indeed and the weight of that realization tights her stomach in knots, her eyes well up and she sheds some silent tears in mourning for the person she was, the person she thought she’d be till her last breath.

**_When in doubt, choose the path of less resistance_ ** , her father used to say. Her father, that never chose any other kind of path in his life, who made an art out of living as cowardly and unbothered as possible.

She chooses the path of less resistance and it nauseates her, she resents her late father with the summed up strength of all the times she resented him before. It also makes her feel closer to him than she has felt since she entered puberty.

Her injuries heal but the wounds remain. Her body is forever changed, scarred, rearranged from within through many surgical procedures. There is little left that she recognizes from the person she was when she looks in the mirror: her face, mostly, but it feels completely different, like it belongs to someone else already.

She plays the role of obedient patient and does as she is told, all the hard work that was so wisely foretold. She plots, and plans, and schemes while her bones regrowth. Thinks about the slim chances of finding a way out of her current situation while the muscles under her skin gain strength. 

By the time she is discharged by her doctors, she feels small and claustrophobic. Defeated. There is really no other path for her but the one of less resistance so she sucks it up and accepts the unavoidable.

“Nathalie Müller,” says the Chancellor as she leaves a german passport and a manila folder on her bedside table. 

One of the most common names for french women and one of the more common german surnames. She guesses she is going to have to improve her German and they are going to take advantage of her upbringing with a french mother.

“Nathalie.” She rolls the name in her mouth. “It sounds like I’m about to give a lap dance.”

“That might be a little premature, you have just been discharged,” says the doctor without a trace of humour in his words. The Chancellor looks at him like crossing paths with stupid men is her personal penance, imposed by God himself for her unnumbered sins, before getting back to her.

“You will be working in Paris. Financial Markets Authority. Everything is in the folder,” she makes a pause. A dramatic one, intended to gain attention. “You’ll have to lay low.”

“Some basic plastic surgery could suffice.” The doctor seems engrossed in his own world. Far, far up his ass. “I could even make some improvements around the eyes and the nose. Erase some of those wrinkles.”

“For God’s sake, shut up Bauer,” the Chancellor sounds just as done as she feels. “And leave us the room.”

The man seems surprised and deeply offended as he closes the door behind him and Julia finds some small gratification in his humiliation. Leave it to a male plastic surgeon to reduce the complexity of her situation to some unflattering wrinkles. 

“A change of hairstyle and make up will do. There is a reason why we are seated in front of a little flag and our name on a tag at conferences,” the Chancellor says with a diminishing gesture of her hand. “Unless you sing pop or do stupid videos for youtube nobody cares to remember your face or your name anymore.”

“So I guess becoming an Instagrammer is out of the question.”

The other woman shrugs. “As long as you stick to artistic pictures of food.”

A year, ten months and twenty-seven days after the bombing she makes her debut as Nathalie in Paris. She has gotten so used to solitude while she was recovering that the world is too big for her now, too noisy, too full of things that don’t care for her, that could hurt her or kill her in a heartbeat.

She lives afraid of sudden movements around her, of sudden noises. Her own unfamiliar image on shop windows makes her want to run hysterically and not look back.

She wonders if this is a fraction of what David felt when he came back from war and every single fibre of her tells her that everything would be better if she could only talk to him, she would feel safer, secured.

She can’t so she does the next best thing that comes to mind and searches for a therapist, a sickly thin woman that looks at her from disengaging deep eyes and always smells like pricey perfume and cigarettes. Julia transforms committing treason to her own country and dedicating to economic espionage into ethically conflicted praxis at work, and the attempt to end her life into a toxic, abusive relationship.

She pays this stranger to lie through her teeth every Tuesday for an hour and in exchange she gives her a couple of prescriptions and cheap one-liners.

The drugs help. The one-liners, not so much.

She finds herself forever trapped between the person she was and the person she is supposed to be. She can’t find a way to relate to other people, can’t make friends, can’t even have a satisfying one-night stand without almost suffering an anxiety attack.

She becomes so uncomfortable in her own skin that some nights she drinks too much with the sole purpose of dwelling on the past, of surrounding her mind with memories of things she no longer has. David’s face smiles at her from under white silk sheets and she has to shout to the empty void in which the whole city is sunk.

Three years is how much time it takes her to decide to watch the coverage of her death. She finally tries one of those one-liners that is so used it has become a cliché.  **_You have to face your past to overcome it_ ** .

Like it is a small thing. An easy thing.

She knows everything there is to know about the incident, it was all in the briefings the Germans gave her, but that knowledge doesn’t protect her from the moving images on her screen. It’s like cutting her skin a million times, like the shrapnel of the bomb is finally catching up to her.

The state funeral, the eulogies, the public displays of despair by people that were barely acquaintanced are just sad. In a pitiful, pathetic kind of way. A pantomime. A satire. But there were cameras rolling when she was giving her final speech that caught the whole ordeal and Julia watch that particular video over, and over, and over again for a whole weekend.

She still thinks of herself as Julia even is nobody else in the whole world does.

She drinks another glass of red wine and presses play again but it always ends in the same way, with dust, ashes and death. With David, battered and covered in blood checking frantically for a pulse in her unconscious body, covering her with his own body and protecting her from falling pieces of rubble until the paramedics arrive.

She wishes that the video had better resolution, that she could freeze the frame and zoom in until his face was on her screen and maybe she would allow herself the sentimental stupidity of touching the screen and imagine that it’s his face.

This is what she left behind: lies, destruction and the only other person that ever knew her so completely, and she has to come to terms with that because otherwise, she is going to drive herself crazy out of melancholy and longing.

She deletes de video and signs up for a bloody Pilates class.

Six months after that, David finds her in the streets of Paris.

Fuck.

She runs away in the backseat of a taxi, with her heartbeat drumming in her hears and unable to catch her breath. The last time she saw him, she thought they were going to be together for a long time and then…

For two days she can’t sleep. She goes out, buys some cigarettes and smokes the whole packet in a few hours. She walks around her small apartment as the night goes by like a tiger in a cage. Terrified and exhilarated at the same time. Seeing David again, letting him know that she was still alive was something that she had only entertained as part of a best scenario/worst scenario mind trail. 

On the third day, she goes to see her handler. He is a sweet looking guy in his forties that is as much German or French as she is and works as a solicitor in one of the most important firms in the city.

“I saw someone from my past the other day,” she says as soon as the door closes behind her. She is too wired up to waste time in niceties.

He calmly takes off his glasses and puts them on his desk before offering her a seat with a gesture of his hand. “Did they recognize you?”

“I am not sure.” 

She is sure. Completely sure, since she went to his hotel to try to convince him to forget all about their fortuitous encounter without much success. He kissed her, hurriedly and heartfelt and her lips still tingle if she dares to think about it. 

“Do we have a problem, Nathalie?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. Let's start with the basics. Who saw you?”

She stares up ahead and very carefully doesn’t answer that question.

Stanley —they didn’t even bother giving him a French name— waits for a couple of seconds and then rolls his eyes in exasperation.

“We are not going on a killing spree, but we need to be prepared before certain information hits certain newspapers.”

She clenches her jaw, makes her features hard like concrete and chooses a particular steady tone of voice.

“There won’t be any leak of information.”

“You seem awfully sure of that.” 

“I am.”

“I still need the name.”

She knows that. He will have David followed for a while, his calls and social visits monitored and some months from now, when nothing will come of it, hopefully, they will leave him alone.

She schools her features not to show her resignation. “David Budd.”

Her handler takes a moment to look at her intently and then he shakes his head lightly as if changing tactics. For sure, somewhere there is a whole report about the precise nature of her past relationship with her PPO, written with excruciating detail, that her handler must have read carefully.

She doesn’t squirm in her seat as much as being under his scrutiny makes her uncomfortable.

“Okay, what I’m going to say to you now comes from years of experience in this line of work, and if you need further clarification we would need to schedule another kind of appointment.” He leans over the desk that stands between them, crosses his hands. “We are not fighting a war and you are not a criminal. You do a job that is of a sensitive nature, but you can have vacations given certain… precautions.”

She goes back to her apartment with her head spinning; a mix of feelings and thoughts that leave her drained. There are choices ahead of her that she never thought were part of the equation and the perks of having a relatively unimportant job that conflict with her sense of ambition. 

She looks at her reflection in the mirror and grabs the sides of the sink with both hands, her knuckles white, her upper arms protesting the tension she forces into her muscles.

“Shit.”

The word echoes on the tiles and fills all the little spaces of her mind that are not over-analyzing the situation.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

She made a life owning up to the hard choices she made, but they have piled up to the point where she has barely room leg enough to keep dealing with the consequences. She has nothing left to offer that doesn't depend on the goodwill of others.

She will arrange a meeting. A whole weekend in some private house away from privy eyes and they will have the time to clear the air and say a proper goodbye, one that is not a blast full of blood and dust. 

She owes him that much and she deserves nothing less; a weekend to create sour-sweet memories and then a lifetime to dwell on them.

Bloody lovely.

She makes the arrangements and figures out a way to send him a card with the place and date two months away, and for that time he almost drives herself completely and utterly insane. She doesn’t sleep, she eats at odd hours and spends a lot of time seated on the bottom of her bathtub, letting the spray of hot water warm her ever cold skin.

Her mind is stuck in a loop that only seems to play that first time David hugged her back. The way he smelled, of starch and aftershave, the soundness of his body and presence, the way his cheek, slowly found its place against her cheek with his chin in the crook of her neck. Over, and over again.

She never in her life felt safer or freer than the times she spent with him talking under the sheets but it’s been almost five years since he thought her dead and a lot changes in that time. People often changes a lot in that time.

She rents a car and drives herself to the north of Spain where they are to meet. It takes her two days but she doesn't like to use her passport if there is any other choice. She arrives early enough to light the fire, open some red wine and start to drink it at a respectable pace. She is a little afraid that it will all blow in her face again, this time, figuratively speaking for a change.

There is the noise of a car approaching and a quote she read some time ago pops in her mind like a stupid internet add;  **_Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory_ ** **.** She is somewhat afraid that this is the case, that her mind has chosen to fixate on the better aspects of her relationship with David and exacerbate them to cope with the dreariness of her life.

She serves herself some more wine.

The door opens and David lets himself in. He takes only a couple steps and lets his travel bag on the floor with studied care. He wears the kind of casual clothes that feature in photoshoots for magazines as the light from the fireworks wanders on his already handsome features.

She pulls her legs up and prays to a God unknown to her, that if she is going to have her heart broken into a million pieces at least let her make love to this man one last time.

“When do you have to go?”

These are his first words to her. A little demanding and still from a distance. He looks exactly as he did when he was her PPO and was quickly calculating the risk of their next route.

“Sunday. Late afternoon.”

“All right then.”

He lets his jacket fall to the floor in a puddle of cloth, approaching her with a telling glint in his eyes, and she thanks God and her lucky stars.

She lets him pull her ankle and move her along the couch, lets him make her stand in front of him and she is back to that loop in her head, that first hug.

He smells as she remembered, his presence is still as solid and comforting as it was back then, and she is exhilarated and heartbroken that her memory hadn’t embellish him in the least.

“Hi,” she says. There is black hole devouring her from the inside out where her stomach used to be.

He puts his arms around her and kisses her with too much bite and too much tongue, but it is perfect, it’s fucking perfect and she grabs his shirt, handfuls of cotton that feel like a lifeline.

“I have missed you so much,” he says over her mouth, his breathing giving her oxygen, “So much. So much.”

They have hasty sex on the couch, bold and a little harsh as they have always been, and then go to the bedroom to sleep naked under starked sheets.

She wakes up to the sunrise shyly illuminating the room and David’s calloused hand slowly caressing her side from shoulder to hip. He takes the time to trace every single one of her scars, to worship the ugly puckered skin with the pad of his fingers.

“We both have been lucky,” he says, traces of sleep still clutched to his voice.

She places one of her feet between his. The weight of the things she has to say to him pins her to the mattress, but she can’t find the right words to convey it all. She scouts a little closer to him so that she can drag her leg over his.

“What is your name now?”

“Nathalie.”

His mouth twitches ever so slightly and she is reminded of those first days of their acquaintance when she usually said all matter of things that didn’t agree with him.

“You don’t like it,” she ascertains, her chin going up as a reflex. She has few reasons to be proud of herself these days but she finds pride in still being able to read him.

“I like Julia. I like you.”

She kisses him because she can’t find a better answer. She kisses him soft and sweet as the morning sun fills the room. Her lips on his lips, moving slowly as she puts her hands on either side of his face. She caresses his cheekbones and when her thumbs move up to his temples she feels the little bump of scarred tissue just below the hairline.

He freezes. She leans back and open her eyes.

“Bullet scar,” he speaks, softly, as if trying not to scare her away. His hand goes from her shoulder blade to her nape, unimposing but not letting her back further away. “I tried to shoot myself after the bombing.”

She knew, of course she knew, it is written in at least half a dozen reports of different nature, but hearing him say the words makes her want to crawl under his skin. That blast changed her in more ways than she cares to contemplate but she knows that if someone were to blow him to pieces in front of her and spin things around to make her feel responsible for it she would start a war. She would burn the world to ashes and decimate everything on it with her mourning anger.

She scratches his scar softly. 

“I’m really sorry. About everything.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

If she could, she would trap this moment forever, this feeling of not having to keep pushing and keep fighting just to keep her head barely above water, to not sink completely into despair. That blast that took her old life left her with a permanent bruise within her shaped like him.

She takes some air. “You made me feel more like myself than anybody else, David. Including me.”

“Not anymore?”

She chuckles, looks away and rubs her forefront. “I’m not even sure I am myself anymore.”

She hadn’t thought about what to expect of him after that. A quiet moment of introspection, probably, a really bad joke, maybe. Instead David moves fast, settles himself between her legs, his forearms at her sides holding most of the weight of his upper body. He kisses her left clavicle, bites the juncture of her neck and her shoulder, drags his teeth and his tongue all the way to her ear.

“Yes, you are.” He puts his big expanded hand around her neck without adding more pressure than its dead weight and bites her earlobe. A moan, long and loud scapes her lips. “You are still yourself. I see you, Julia.”

There is nothing tender about him anymore, nothing sweet, just David. Unpolished, hard on the edges and sharp enough to kill, all concealed under good-boy looks.

It makes her boil, the feeling of his skin on hers, the way he says her name. She finds a sense of fight that she thought she had lost in the challenge she sees in his eyes.

She pushes him until he gives way and they both roll so that he is the one on his back. She blocks her elbows as the plant of her hands expand along his chest and she keeps his hips still and steady with her weight and the force of her thighs.

He smiles, a devilish thing, his hands casually on her kneecaps.

She drags her short nails across his chest and his stomach, enough to leave, reddish marks behind. The muscles under his skin are solid and wiry, and when she looks there is a glint in his eyes that makes her heart beat faster just by itself.

She rolls her hips. Once, twice, half a dozen times until the grip on her kneecaps tightens and then she searches with her hand between them and aligns him to her. Neither of them break eye contact while she downs herself to him, drier and faster than optimal but still exactly what they both want.

She sets a slow pace, leans on to kiss him, to smell him in, to feel him even closer to her. She wants to tattoo that feeling of him on her bones and carry it with her forever.

She feels powerful and unstoppable like she was once. She feels deserving of things reserved for great men, and not like a scared kitten that startles with any sudden noises.

“Yeah,” she says breathily. There are full sentences said in the way he looks back at her.

Sunday afternoon approaches way too soon. It is noon, there is sunlight bathing all corners of the kitchen as she sits on the counter with thick wool socks picking up and eating the fruit that David patiently peels and cuts.

He keeps insisting on making a plan, on making a rule out of this weekend instead of an exception. The side of his hip playfully bumps against the outer side of her thigh and she is so desperate to grasp the feeling of peace and lust and happiness, to keep being this person that is long-buried and forgotten except for when she is with him, that she lets herself get convinced.

“Okay. Let’s make a plan,” she says against her better judgement, smiling reservedly.

David grins wide and contagious, puts his calloused, big hands on the sides of her jaw and kisses her with tender slowness, and she forgets to keep on worrying for a future that lost its allure some time ago.

They steal weekends here and there. Never in Paris, never in any big city where the risk of being recognized together is higher. Certainly, absolutely never in the UK. When the summer arrives they spend ten days in Italy, driving a car rented with an alias, and sleeping in little villages that have been witness to a history with more bloodshed and betrayals than the two of them combined. And that is saying quite a lot.

They stuff themselves with pasta and completely suck at attempting to speak Italian. The air is humid, almost suffocating as they lie entangled in cheap sheets, sweaty and hot in a room without air conditioning and an open window with a view over the Arno river.

“ **Ich habe einen britischen Pass, wo ist eine Bar?** ” he says, a whisper on her skin right below her right ear, the pronunciation so terrible that the words are barely recognizable.

She guffaws, loud and unstoppably, shaking both their bodies with a mirth she almost forgot she was still able to feel.

“That’s the only thing I know how to say in German.” He is smiling, her lips travelling down over the column of her throat.

“I wouldn’t be as bold as to say you  _ know  _ how to say  _ anything _ in German.”

He pinches her waist in retaliation for her criticism and Julia laughs again as she squirmish away from his tickling torture, somehow manages not to fall out of the bed by grace of some kind of miracle.

“German is terrible.”

“It could be worse, the Hungarians could have been involved instead,” she says. David snorts loudly. “Although for all that I know you could have been speaking Hungarian back there, that language is fucking impossible.”

She jumps out of the bed before he can begin his attack again in retaliation but is a lost battle. It doesn’t matter, she doesn’t mind that much when David catches her near the door of the bathroom and pins her to the wall.

“You are mean,” he says without the feeling behind the words— “You are a mean ghost, Julia Montague.”

He pronounces her full name like the secret it is, against the skin of her left clavicle as he insinuates his knee between hers. 

“Yeah? And what are you going to do about that?”

Their improbable existence in the same room at the same time is a secret in itself, and as she embraces David’s hips with her legs, she doesn’t really care. The sound of the river passing by comes from the open window and it combines with their gasps in a beautiful symphony. It feels like they are the only beings awake in the city and she feels so very awake. Her skin sets alight everywhere it comes in contact with his skin, she feels set on fire, complete, alive.

It can’t last. How can it last when everything that she is could shatter the core of his lifestyle in a billion tiny pieces?

But a year passes by, and then another two, and this sort of secret, long-distance relationship doesn’t disappear into thin air as she always assumed it would. Quite on the contrary, it solidifies around them, around their lives.

They walk slowly hand in hand in the warm winter of Athens looking for a place to have a coffee. She never thought she was this kind of person that walks hand in hand with another, a public display of affection for the world to see and judge, but it turns out this is also truly who she is given a chance to let her guard down.

“What do you tell them? When you go away.” She asks David. She uses “ _ them _ ” because she doesn’t really know who he owes explanations back at home, she never wanted to know if this “ _ them _ ” encompasses his children, close friends or also his ex-wife.

“I tell them the truth.”

Her heart skips a beat and sudden dread washes over her. “The  _ truth _ ?”

“That I’m with you.” He moves the hand that is entangled with hers until the back of her hand is in front of his mouth and then kisses it tenderly while looking at her in the eye. “With Nathalie, whom I met in Paris some years ago.”

She tries this thought in her mind, the dichotomy between Natalie and Julia that is always so clear in her head as far as David is not involved. It is a little unsettling, that he might consider her a different person in his mind, but she has no reasons to reproach him.

“Is that the truth?”

“Close enough.”

The street opens to Syntagma Square but they take a turn to the left and instead of walking across it they border it. There is a small coffee shop there, probably a tourist trap, but it’s colourful and cozy, and the smiling guy on the banner of the place seems trustworthy somehow.

They sit on a small table and ask for a coffee as soon as they take their coats off.

“And nobody is giving you shit? For running away all the time?”

He looks at her with his poker face, the one he uses when he is worried, annoyed or looking for threats and exit ways.

“Not anymore.”

“Ah.”

She is not sure where this sudden curiosity of hers comes from. She is not a naive little girl, she has not been either of those things for quite a long time, and she knows that this line of conversation only leads to trouble. Here be monsters, old maps used to warn about uncharted territories. Here be monsters indeed.

The waiter comes with two steaming coffees and complimentary glasses of water and she looks mesmerized at the slow way David moves in circles the little spoon inside his cup to dissolve the brown sugar.

“You never cared much about life back home,” he says. The waiter is conveniently out of earshot and there aren't many patrons, none of them seated close enough to them.

“I cared. Couldn’t do much about anything, one way or the other.”

“And now you can?”

Julia looks closely at him, with her own poker face in place, daring him to say what he might be trying to imply with plain words. Her hard stare has granted her more free passes over the years than she cares to count, but David doesn’t budge. She forgets sometimes that he is not one to back down because he isn’t the pushing type either, but he plants his two feet in the ground, grows roots like a tree when anybody tries to make him take a step back.

“Forget I asked,” she concedes, finally, she has learned the value of a strategic retreat.

“No. I’ll answer you, but you have to ask what you really want to know.”

She hardens beneath her skin, her muscles and her veins become steele and concrete. “I just did.”

“No, you didn’t.”

It terrifies her, how David can  _ see  _ her with blatant easiness in a way that makes her feel vulnerable and weak. It is also thilling, when she can remember that she doesn’t need to be this hard and conceited with him.

“I want to know if your children are mad at you for not being with them all the holidays, I want to know if your co-workers try to set you up with friends. I want to know if your ex-wife resents this… this lifestyle.” She can hear the tension in her words, the effort not to speak louder. She punctuates the end of her discourse tapping her index finger to the table as if explicitly making a point like she did back when she was in Parliament.

David drinks from his cup with studious calm that is mostly a pose. She knows him, she knows he is flared up behind his cool demeanor.

“My children are grown-ups now, they don’t want or require my presence much. My co-workers know that I’m not single and my ex-wife has her own life and little time or inclination to pay much attention to mine.”

Julia takes a sip of scalding coffee for a lack of a better reaction. She doesn’t know what exactly she was expecting to hear from him.

“I’ve requested to be assigned to the British Embassy in Paris.”

This was definitely not something she was expecting to hear.

“But—” She wants to say that it is a dangerous move, truth be told, a lot of time has passed and they are no longer important pieces of the geopolitical game anymore.

“I know you have spent the last years thinking this was somehow a temporary arrangement, and it might be true, but not in the way you thought, so if you don’t want this, you better speak now.”

It is something she has not dared to think about, what would happen if they could really be together, what would she choose if the choice is be given to her. It all rushes through her in a couple of seconds. She looks out of the window to the square, with its gray, utilitarian buildings shaping the open space, the Old Royal Palace not really in sight from where she is sitting. It looks cold and bleak. She is warm and comfortable, though. David hands cover hers on the table and she knows that even when she didn’t dare to think about this possibility she still hoped for it.

She returns her gaze to him.

“I hope your French is better than your German.” And turns her hand under his and squeezes back.

She wears sunglasses and a hat, and if she were younger she would be wearing pants so short that would be almost considered fashionable knickers. She settles for a sundress instead.

She drinks a lemonade and tries not to think about the heat as she waits for her handler. She doesn’t have to wait much, a couple of minutes later he lets the dead weight of his body fall onto the chair beside her, he is wearing a suit and sweating profusely.

“I hate this terrace,” he says as way of introduction.

“You chose this terrace.”

He makes an annoyed face. “I forgot about the heatwave. And about the summer tourists.” He opens his briefcase and gets a manila envelope from it.

“Is this it?” She asks. It’s a mere formality. All the previous necessary steps have been taken, all the key players are already informed, all the important people have already agreed, and yet—

“This is it.” He smiles with a sort of tenderness she didn’t though was allowed to him. “Pretty standard non disclosure agreement under penalty of prosecution for treason and espionage in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, respectively. He just has to sign them off and it is all done.”

She nods, tries not to smile as she puts the envelope inside her purse and fails at it.

“Nathalie Müller,” the handler says,”who would have thought you would get your happy ending.”

"Not much of an ending," she answers while she gets up.

"No, I guess is not." He takes a swing at the lemonade she has left behind while gathering her things, and raises his hand to call the attention of the waiter.

She takes a step out of terrace and into the unforgiving sun.

"Hey, Nathalie?" She stops and turns back to look at him almost provoking a collision with a group of elderly tourists. " **We'll always have Paris** ," he declares wiggling his eyebrows.

"How long have you been sitting on that one?"

"Far, far too long for it to be funny."

She slides her sunglasses down her nose to look at him. "I'll try not to blow it up this time," she says, and winks at him.

She can still hear him laugh as she lets the sea people walking down the street swallow her away. She takes out her phone and calls the new French number in her contacts.

"I have the papers," she tells David as soon as the call connects. There is no real reason to call him, she is going to see him as soon as she arrives to the apartment, but she is kind of excited and unused to be able to reach him so easily.

"Good. Any follow up?"

"The usual. Be discreet, be conspicuous, be alert."

"I guess we'll have to spend a lot of time in the apartment," he says in a tone of voice that gives away his train of thought.

"We might get bored," she teases back.

"Nah. We have a whole lot of catching up to do."

She laughs. "I'll see you in a bit."

She ends the call and goes to stop a taxi. She feels happy and relaxed. 

Julia Montague died ten years ago. 

Somehow she doesn't remember ever being this alive.


End file.
